Truth Without
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: Trueman has plans for Yuuki Jyuudai. Now, about that kid in the frilly shirt . . .


**Title**: Truth Without  
**Author**: Nina/**technicolornina**  
**Fandom**: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX  
**Pairing/Characters**: Trueman, Johan, Jyuudai  
**Word Count**: 1 190  
**Spoilers:** Up through 173.  
**Story Rating**: PG-13  
**Story Summary**: Trueman has plans for Yuuki Jyuudai. Now, about that kid who's trying to get in the way . . .  
**Notes**: N/A  
**Feedback**: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.  
**Special Thanks/Dedications**: Written for **brokenlevel**, who won my **gulf_aid_now** auction on LiveJournal and requested Trueman fic. Hopefully this is not such an episode rewrite that it's pointless-rather, it aims to answer a question that canon never did (namely, why is it that Jyuudai saw Johan as Trueman, instead of Trueman as Johan?). And, um. I tried to make it Truemancentric? It's in his head, anyway, although he's observing outside events.

* * *

_I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am.  
I know that I am not a category  
I am not a thing - a noun  
I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process-  
An integral function of the universe. _

-Buckminster Fuller, as portrayed in "Tower of Babble," _Godspell_

* * *

It was inconceivable.

The boy was almost too bright to look at, much less attempt to copy. Trueman watched him wander through the deserted streets, footsteps echoing off abandoned plate-glass windows and empty walls of concrete, looking down each street to the west like a . . .

The truth of the matter—and what else could he speak?—was that Trueman had no idea what it was "like." When one spoke in absolute truths, the need for simile and metaphor disappeared. He abandoned the train of thought and tried to look into the boy's mind again, but not a single crack or ripple of doubt made itself known—only a pale, shimmering curtain of pure, hateful light and innocent hopes and desires completely unrelated to truths or even rational thought. A high, clear voice rang out in a call intended to carry.

"Jyuudai?"

No answer, as Trueman had known there would not be. The boy he intended to stop before he had the chance to set foot outside Domino City ever again was currently locked in a battle with the idiot who thought a weak human bond with his sister more important than the truths wrought by Darkness. The odds the elder would win were small, his mind clouded by human sentiments and preconceived notions, but whether he won was a small matter. If he did, Yuuki Jyuudai would perish; if not, he would find himself absorbed shortly into the glory of absolute truth. The Darkness within him was vast, and a satisfying amount of it had proved to be completely unrelated to the Gentle Creation variety. Deaths—doubts—pain, forgiven but still lingering in the back of his mind—Darknesses enough to create an entire army of Jyuudais, and if not for the troublesome spirit lurking inside his soul and Saioh's ridiculous human ambition to be the sole cause of the downfall of the universe's so-called saviour, Trueman would have had him then.

Well. One of those obstacles would either soon defeat Yuuki Jyuudai or be removed from the field, and the other could almost certainly be overcome, given the means to do so. The vital question of the matter was simple: how?

"Jyuudai!"

And now there was this boy.

How his plane had landed with nobody else aboard was not Trueman's concern. Neither was his apparent ability to somehow sense and know that Yuuki Jyuudai was in Domino City, instead of on Academy Island. But reason bespoke that with such an ability—not to mention that troubling, troublesome curtain of light in his mind—he might team up with the other's guardian spirit and cause problems indeed. The distance from the airport to KaibaCorporation was far, but—

"Something's wrong."

The voice that spoke was not the voice of the boy with the disturbingly closed-off mind. It was deeper, older, somehow—

"I know that," the boy answered. Then he put his hands on his arms and rubbed them as though cold, even though he came from a much colder climate and, humans being what they were, must almost certainly be too warm in Domino City's balmy late-spring temperatures. "I'm not sure what it is, but—"

An explosion from the KaibaCorporation building. The boy's head jerked up, and then a winged horse appeared next to him, somehow kneeling and telling the boy—speaking! As though in any logical world there existed such a thing as a speaking horse, or a winged one!—to mount. Had Trueman been weak enough to feel emotions such as human anger, he might have sworn aloud. Instead he watched the boy scramble on—clearly not an experienced rider, but competent enough to get on and stay on—and the horse take flight before turning back to Yuuki Jyuudai, flying down the side of the KaibaCorporation tower. Troublesome boy. Troublesome spirits. A troublesome combination that would rue the day its members turned their backs on real _truth_.

There was still, though, the question of how to deal with the boy making his way to the docks on the back of a winged, bejewelled horse as though he did it every day of his life.

Not a single shred of doubt, of fear, of anger, no unforgiven deeds, no regretted actions, not so much as a hasty word spoken in anger and quickly taken back. No shadow of guilt or uncertainty, not even the kind of silly, childish fears or foolish, trivial annoyances that made the students of Academy Island so very ready to accept the truth of Darkness.

Just a shimmering curtain of light and the apparent ability, as Yuuki Jyuudai had, to call forth spirits from other dimensions into this reality.

Johan Andersen.

Trueman reached out again for the boy's mind, certain that for the first time in his long, long history, he'd fallen victim to such a lowly thing as a fallibility so vast as to be nearly on par with human. But there was still nothing to grasp, only an intense focus on the boy now zooming away on the motorized cycle Saioh had picked him up on.

Trueman watched. Any moment now the Darkness swirling around his deck would be enough to-

Yes.

He watched the cycle spin away across the dock, wondering absently if he should wish for Yuuki Jyuudai to be alive or dead, and then the point was rendered moot by the even rise and fall of his chest. The sound of footsteps approached, and for the first time in his many, many years of existence, or non-existence, such as it were, he felt something approaching anger. That he should be balked at this crucial juncture by someone so seemingly insignificant, that he could easily see his way to defeating Yuuki Jyuudai once and for all if only he could get inside-!

Ah, but perhaps that was the answer, was it not?

The boy shivered a little when Trueman touched his neck, but gave no other indication he even knew himself to not be alone. Even his horse-spirit was quiet, back in his deck and not on the alert. Then he raised his head again to look out the side-street toward the docks, but now there were two pairs of eyes seeing from that perspective so much lower than Trueman's own, and when he put a hand on the side of the building, a hand swarming with swirling, bruise-coloured Darkness that searched and quested but could not find its way truly inside of him, six fingers instead of three felt the prefabricated metal.

He stepped out around the corner of the building.

"Jyuudai?"

And so, Trueman hoped-hoped? When such as he was made of the opposite of hope, of cold truths and the despair that became the final station and outlook for almost every person in the human race? But yes, somehow, in some way, he hoped, as Yuuki Jyuudai looked up at the approaching figure and called it by the wrong name. So, he hoped, would come the fall of the world's saviour, here, at the hands of one who loved and hoped and emanated that hateful light.

And so the world would fall.


End file.
